Edmund D. Sowers arrived in Texas from Illinois in 1856 and claimed 32 acres of good land with available spring water in the Parsons headright, or land grant. The area is now in West Irving near Pioneer Dr. and Beltline Roads.

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The Parsons land grant is a rectangle of land extending east/west about 2 miles and north/south about 1 ½ miles with the cemetery on the north edge of the north side.

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Edmund Sowers was the owner of a store in the Sowers community and the town was sometimes called Sowers Store. Along with the store, it had two physicians, and eventually a school that was established in 188.

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Before the civil war began in 1861, tthere was a once per week mail stop at the Sowers store on the Dallas to Birdville route. It was discontinued for several years during the war. Birdville’s original name was Ft. Bird and was the earliest settlement in Tarrant Co.  Birdville is just north of Ft. Worth and close to Hurst and North Richland Hills. It was annexed into Haltom City in 1990.

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After the civil war which ended in 1865, Mr. Sowers reestablished a post office and served as postmaster for the Sowers area before it passed to H.N. Lucas. The mail route was then Dallas to Grapevine serving Sowers and Estelle. Estelle being just east of present day DFW airport near the Dallas and Tarrant county line.

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According to the Sowers Cemetery Historical marker, the earliest interments on the Parsons land grant were in 1868, marked only with stones and on a section of the cemetery that years later would be known as Beulahland Memorial Park. These graves were believed to be of a woman and her daughter who befell an unknown tragic death.

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To challenge the Historical Marker’s earliest interments, a broken and buried headstone was uncovered and restored in 2022 of Henry Ewalt who died November 1, 1865, at 8 days old. Henry Ewalt was the son of Noah Spears Ewalt and Mary Jane Johnson Ewalt and was the nephew to early pioneer William Haley. The 1865 Henry Ewalt marker is the oldest documented burial within the Irving city limits.

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Also, the family of Catherine Caster Hawes Worthington added a modern-day marker indicating her death date as 1867. Her original fieldstone marker shows only had her initials ‘CW’ scratched onto it. Catherine is buried in the same northwest section of the cemetery as Henry Ewalt.

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To add to the lore, a newspaper article from 1964 sites a man with the surname Applewhite as the earliest interment. The article specifically mentions the Applewhite grave as one of the motivations for Sower’s adjacent property donation in 1874. It should be noted, however, that there is no official account of an Applewhite burial in cemetery records.

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Regardless of the history of these earliest graves, on August 14, 1874, Mr. Sowers honored existing gravesites by donating land for school, church and cemetery purposes. The portion for the cemetery being south and adjacent to the earliest gravesites where the church and school were designated to the west of the cemetery. He gave free cemetery plots to members of the community.